The RHS Facebook page is a rich archive of history-related posts by Carol Flynn, RHS Facebook admin and writer until mid-2025. Carol prolifically wrote a wide variety of meticulously researched local history articles for RHS. She continues to write for the Beverly Review and other media sources with articles particularly focused on local Ridge history.
Women's History Month
The Ridge Historical Society will be open today, Sunday, March 5, from 1 to 4 p.m. The address is 10621 S. Seeley Avenue. Admission is free.
MarchWomen’s History Month and Irish American Heritage Month – Part 1
March is both Women’s History Month and Irish American Heritage Month so for the next few weeks we’ll alternate in exploring these topics in relationship to the Ridge.
Many remarkable women have had connections to Beverly/Morgan Park. The Hofer family stands out because all five daughters – Mari, Bertha, Amalie, Andrea, and Elizabeth – were pioneers in the kindergarten movement and other social causes at the beginning of the 1900s.
The kindergarten movement helped to revolutionize the way children’s education was viewed. The work of the Hofer sisters helped establish kindergarten as the foundation of the American school system.
In the traditional model for educating young children, they were taught at home how to read and write and do simple arithmetic. They learned by lecture and memorization, and they were expected to be quiet and industrious to prepare themselves for the working world.
In the late 1700s, Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi, a Swiss educator and reformer, shared his observations that children learned best by investigation, imagination, and doing. He started experimental schools with activities like drawing, writing, singing, physical exercise, model making, collecting, and field trips. He allowed for individual differences and grouped students together by ability.
In 1837, Friedrich Froebel, a follower of Pestalozzi, opened a program in Prussia/Germany he called “kindergarten,” or child garden, to signify children should be nourished like flowers in a garden.
Froebel sought to teach children how to think, not what to think, and used the natural play of children to enhance learning. He developed learning experiences using educational toys, stories, songs, games, and crafts.
He trained women as teachers for his program, believing they had superior nurturing ability for working with young children.
Froebel’s work was banned in Prussia for being too radical, causing those trained in his methods to leave the country to establish programs elsewhere.
Famous "graduates" of early revolutionary kindergarten programs included Albert Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright.
The first kindergarten in the U.S. was started in Wisconsin in 1855 by one of Froebel’s students, and was conducted in German. The first English-language kindergarten opened in Boston.
The kindergarten movement became closely tied to two other social reform movements of the Progressive Era of the late 1800s, settlements and playgrounds.
Settlement houses were organizations set up to provide services to help alleviate poverty. They were usually found in large buildings in urban areas heavily populated by recent immigrants. Social workers, teachers, ministers, and other service providers lived or “settled” in the facility to be closer to the people with whom they worked.
The most famous settlement house in this country was Hull House in Chicago started by Jane Addams. Other Chicago settlement houses included the Chicago Commons Social Settlement and the Fellowship House.
The first outreach at the settlement houses was to children and mothers, with daycares, kindergartens, and playgrounds; classes in English, crafts, and homemaking; and mothers’ clubs.
The playground movement was started in the 1890s by reformers who advocated that supervised play could improve the mental, moral, and physical well-being of children. Private athletic clubs had always been around for the wealthy, but now city parks and playgrounds, swimming pools and fieldhouses were built, and trained play leaders were hired to plan and conduct activities. This soon expanded to include adult activities as well.
The Chicago park system developed as one of the largest and best in the country.
The Hofers were leaders in all of these movements.
The five Hofer sisters and their three brothers were the children of Mari Ruef and Franz Xaver Hofer.
Born in 1821 in Baden, a state in Germany bordering France and Switzerland, Hofer fled to the U.S. in 1849 after participating in a failed revolution. He and Mari Ruef, born in Baden in 1836, married in 1853 in New York. They moved to Iowa where they farmed. He served as a lieutenant in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War.
The Hofers had a passion for social justice and reform that they passed down to their children. They bought a newspaper in Iowa through which they shared their “progressive” views, and all the children were trained in the newspaper and printing fields.
The sons left to seek their fortunes on the west coast and started several newspapers. The daughters worked at the family newspaper and attended colleges to become teachers.
Two of the daughters moved to Chicago, and were soon followed by the parents and the other three sisters. They made their home at 1753 West 96th Street, where their house still stands on the edge of Ridge Park.
One of the sons wrote in his newspaper out west that his parents “are now comfortably settled in a cosy (sic) home in one of the most charming and healthful suburbs – Longwood.”
In the next posts we will look at the amazing work of the Hofer sisters. This picture of the Hofer family was user submitted on Ancestry.com.
March continues as Women's History Month. This week's Beverly Review includes a feature on La Julia Rhea, a Black opera singer of exceptional talent who lived in Blue Island.
Her career spanned the 1930s and 1940s. Although her voice was acknowledged as amazing, she was denied opportunites due to her race; plus, no recordings of her voice have been found. Not many people are familiar with her.
The article can be found online today at: https://www.beverlyreview.net/eedition/page_73fee2c1-47ca-5765-a156-b4f6b99fe0da.html and is out in print tomorrow.
Rhea did break two race barriers that laid the groundwork to help other Black singers.
Rhea was the first Black woman allowed to audition for the Metropolitan Opera Capmpany in New York, and although the audition went very well, she was told “there is no chance for a colored singer to appear at the Metropolitan."
She also broke the race barrier at the Chicago Lyric Opera, where she sang the lead in "Aida," her signature role, for a special benefit performance. It was a one-time event and she was not invited back.
The family moved to Blue Island in the 1950s, restoring an old farmhouse into a "fairy tale creation." She died in Blue Island at the age of 94 in 1992.
This photo by Bob Fila of the Chicago Tribune shows La Julia Rhea in her home in Blue Island in 1986.
This week's article in the Beverly Review for Women's History Month is on Pleasant Thiele Rowland, the founder of the American Girl doll line.
The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is "Celebrating Women Who Tell Our Stories."
Pleasant Rowland made history through history. She created dolls from various periods of American history and told their stories from the viewpoints of young girls.
Pleasant was strongly influenced by her paternal grandmother, who lived in Beverly for over forty years. Pleasant herself lived in Beverly from the ages 6 to 10.
https://www.beverlyreview.net/news/community_news/article_a38a7d5e-c802-11ed-9bff-db91a8d9655e.html
MarchWomen’s History Month – Part 2 on the Hofer Sisters
A few weeks ago, posts on the Hofer sisters started. The Hofer sisters are stellar examples of the intelligent, accomplished women who lived on the Ridge whose stories need to be shared. The five Hofer sisters were leaders in the kindergarten, social settlement, and playground movements in the U.S.
Oldest daughter Mari Ruef Hofer (1858 – 1929) was the musician in the family. She was a pioneer in music education for children, and in incorporating singing, dancing, pageantry, and games into regular classroom and playtime for children.
Young children learn by observing, experimenting, and doing, not by being lectured to and forced to memorize a bunch of facts. While this seems like an obvious concept today, it was a novel thought in the 1800s. It was people like Mari Hofer and her sisters who revolutionized the way child education was viewed, leading to the kindergarten and early childhood programs of today.
Mari graduated from the Mount Carroll Seminary, Illinois, in 1887, and did graduate work at the University of Chicago in 1897-99.
Mari taught school children herself, in Chicago and other locations, and she taught teachers how to educate young children, as a faculty member at several universities and a frequent guest lecturer. Her credentials are just way too long to include in a Facebook post.
She never married or had children of her own, but her understanding of children was profound. She advised that teachers had to recognize and nurture both the child sitting at the desk learning the “three R’s” and the unknown “other child,” the “inner child,” the “child of imagination and feeling, the creative, originative child.” This could prove to be the more difficult task.
Mari was an expert on the development of speech in children, and the interconnection of speech and song. She advocated that the mind, speech, and song should be cultivated together in young children, using simple songs with words and concepts children could grasp.
As she said, “Words and thoughts associated with melody remain graven in the mind when more important data vanish away.” Anyone with a song stuck in his or her head recognizes the truth of this – and it’s why the abc’s are taught as a song.
Mari’s expertise was in folk music, and she authored at least twelve publications. Some of the titles include Children’s Singing Games, Popular Folk Games and Dances, Music for the Child World, Camp Recreations, and Educational Playbook Series for Junior and Senior High Schools.
She arranged and managed plays and games for festivals, playgrounds, and settlement houses, including at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.
Perhaps her work can best be illustrated through case studies of some of her events while she was on the faculty at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
The National Guild of Play held its annual meeting there in 1907, and Mari was president of the Guild and in charge of the program. It started with a big outdoor playtime festival for the children, parents, and teachers of Knoxville, with events ranging from kindergarten games to athletics (leap frog, racing, baseball) for the older boys. Singing, dancing, and ring games arranged by Mari were included. Male faculty members volunteered to teach the children how to play marbles and other games.
The next morning included a series of professional speakers on playgrounds and their organization, plays and games for schools and school yards, and playtime festivals. One of the speakers was her sister Amelie Hofer, a founder of the Playground Association of America.
For years, the University held a “Summer School of the South” program for teachers, well attended by people from all over the country, and Mari was on the faculty. In 1908, a summer festival was arranged, with Mari as the chairman.
Today, when we think of summer festivals, we think of beer tents and outside concerts. Back then, summer festivals meant physical activity – games and athletics for all ages.
And there were plenty of activities. The afternoon started with events for children, like Robin Hood and his Merry Men, with costumes, archery contests and bouts, and Maid Marion and a maypole dance, all arranged by Mari.
Just some of the other events included pony races, Olympic sports, tug-o-war, potato and sack races, ring toss, horseshoes, and plenty of costumes, plays, songs, and dances.
Evening events included pantomime and other social games, guild activities like wool weaving and shoe making, and folk activities and performances featuring the cultures of Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Russia, France, Scotland, Poland, and of course, the U.S.
The coordination of this event had to have been amazing, attesting to Mari’s organizational skills as well as her educator and musical talents.
Settlement houses were organizations set up to provide services to help alleviate poverty. They were usually found in large buildings in urban areas heavily populated with recent immigrants.
The most famous settlement house was Hull House in Chicago started by Jane Addams.
All of the Hofer sisters were involved in settlement houses, and they will be covered in more detail in the next posts. Mari ran the music programs for children in several settlement houses. She managed the children’s chorus, made up of 150 youngsters, at the University of Chicago Settlement, founded in 1894. The chorus was considered very well trained, and the concerts they gave were heavily patronized. She was also known to “sympathetically help” the children at the settlement houses in other ways.
When the friends and neighbors of the Hofer family in Beverly managed to find Mari at home, they loved her involvement in community endeavors. For example, at Christmastime, 1915, Mari arranged a “Community Concert of Christmas Carols” at Ridge Park. She was also busy that year staging Nativity plays at St. Paul’s Evangelical Sunday School and the Fellowship House, another Chicago settlement house.
It wasn’t unusual for her sisters to build an entire party around Mari’s talents, back in the days before there were even radios. As an example, in 1911, her youngest sister Elsa and Elsa’s artist husband George Schreiber invited forty friends over for an evening of folk songs conducted by Mari, who was visiting Elsa and George on the west coast.
“Music,” an illustrated magazine on the art, science, and technique of music, or, as the magazine described itself, “music as musicians understand it,” wrote of Mari that “few personalities are more interesting than that of Miss Mari Hofer.”
Mari had her own philosophy on life: “A thoroughly good time is not incompatible with learning something worthwhile.”
Today, parents and grandparents who attend the performances of their beloved little ones in kindergarten holiday shows can thank Mari Hofer for the experience.
Our next post will look at the second daughter, Bertha Hofer.
MarchWomen’s History Month – Part 3 on the Hofer Sisters
The five daughters of the Hofer family that lived in Beverly were leaders in the kindergarten movement in the U.S.
Oldest daughter Mari, profiled in the last post, was an expert in music education for children. This post will look at the second daughter, Bertha, whose career focused on education, administration, and social settlement services, especially for mothers and children.
Bertha Hofer Hegner (1862-1937), like her siblings, was born in Iowa, where her parents settled after immigrating from Baden, on the German-Swiss border.
In the 1880s, several of the Hofer daughters moved to Chicago. Bertha enrolled in a training school for kindergarten teachers run by Elizabeth Harrison, a well-respected educator, as part of the Loring School, a private day and boarding school for girls in the Kenwood area.
[As an aside, the Loring School moved to Beverly and operated in the England J. Barker House at 107th and Longwood Drive from 1935 to its closure in 1962.]
Bertha graduated from that program in 1890, the same year her parents sold the newspaper they were running in Iowa and moved to Chicago, to 1833 West 96th Street, in Beverly, about where the entrance to Ridge Park now exists.
Bertha taught in Lake Forest for a few years, then in 1894, she completed graduate studies in Berlin, Germany, at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus. The kindergarten movement had started with Swiss educator Johan Pestalozzi in the late 1700s, and was furthered in the 1800s by Friedrich Froebel in Prussia/Germany. Froebel’s niece ran the program in Berlin. Bertha later did further graduate study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University in New York.
Chicago saw its first kindergarten in 1873, followed by a training course for teachers a few years later. In 1895, Bertha started the first kindergarten and teacher training program at the Chicago Commons Social Settlement.
Social settlements, started during the Progressive Era of reform, were centers for neighborhood social services usually located in crowded, low-income city areas, primarily populated by recent immigrants. The centers were called settlement houses because social workers, educators, ministers, and health care workers lived on site, or “settled” there, to be close to the people they were assisting.
In addition to providing food, clothing, medical care, and other basic needs, the settlements offered schooling to help people develop skills and knowledge for better jobs and advancement, and to improve their lives in general. Many of the settlements were affiliated with churches.
Hull House, started by social worker Jane Addams, was the most famous U.S. social settlement, but there were others in Chicago that were just as well-regarded.
The Chicago Commons Social Settlement was founded in 1894 by Graham Taylor on the near northwest side of the city.
Taylor was a professor at the Chicago Theological Seminary who specialized in training social workers at the University of Chicago. He was joined in his efforts by Herman F. Hegner from Wisconsin and Iowa, who had graduated from the Milwaukee Normal School for training teachers in 1890, and from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1894, and was ordained a minister in 1895. Taylor and Hegner were the head residents at the Commons.
Bertha was also a resident at the settlement, and in June of 1896, she and Herman Hegner married.
By this point, the Hofer sisters were developing reputations for their various expertises, and Bertha was described as “one of the Hofer sisters, a graduate of the Pestalozzi School in Berlin, whose kindergarten work is widely known through her lectures and her writings.” The Hofer sisters were appearing on stage now with people like Jane Addams and Elizabeth Harrison.
Bertha’s kindergarten became an important part of the Commons’ operations, the foundation for other education programs, like an industrial training school, and services for mothers, children, and families, like a mother’s club and childcare classes. The neighborhood residents strongly supported the kindergarten.
In 1896, Bertha started the Pestalozzi-Froebel Teachers College through the Commons to train kindergarten teachers. In the summers, they offered special teacher institutes. Usually, teachers preferred to attend summer programs in resort areas, not inner cities, but they flocked to Bertha’s program, described at the time as “a boon to would-be successful kindergartners.”
Progressive theory called for educating people to become useful and contributing members of society in general, as well as learning trades for employment. Supportive of working mothers, Bertha introduced “home activities” in her kindergarten to train children to help with basic home chores. This did not replace the teachings of Pestalozzi and Froebel, but, in Bertha’s words, added activities based on their “ideals” to create “a natural bridge between the home and the school.”
Some of the activities the kindergarten children engaged in included washing and putting away items they used including small-scale utensils and dishes; dusting the classroom furniture like the piano; emptying the waste basket; caring for the fish, birds, and plants; and washing the dolls and their clothes. Older children in the settlement’s other education programs helped in the settlement kitchen and dining room, and with the residents’ quarters and general housekeeping. The little ones assisted the older children.
They did these chores accompanied by songs, stories, and pictures. At holiday times, they did special projects like jack-o-lanterns and popcorn garland. In spring, they helped with the outside gardens and milking the cows.
The children loved these projects, and so did the parents. Mothers reported their children willingly helped at home as a result of these activities at school. The children helped throughout the neighborhood, for example, by cleaning up litter.
Training teachers on how to incorporate these home activities into school activities became part of the training program of Bertha’s college.
In 1904, Bertha published a scholarly article titled “Home Activities in the Kindergarten” in Kindergarten Magazine, which was reprinted numerous times. The U.S. Department of Education reproduced the article and distributed thousands of copies.
Bertha and Herman moved from the Commons to raise their family, two daughters and a son, and for Herman to take ministries at several churches in the city. They did some traveling to Europe and the Holy Land.
In 1904, Bertha resigned as head of the kindergarten to concentrate on the training school. Her sister Amalie joined her at the school for several years as principal, and her sister Mari was on the faculty for Music and Games. Herman and Graham Taylor were also on the faculty.
In 1913, Bertha moved the school, now free-standing from the Commons, to a new location, at 618 S. Michigan Ave. Herman became the full-time business manager for the school.
In 1927, the Columbia College of Expression, which offered programs in dramatics, public speaking, and physical education, ran into financial difficulties, and was purchased by the Hofer-Hegner school, and moved to the same building. Bertha ran both schools until she retired in 1936, and her son took over. Bertha introduced a program in 1934 to train people for radio work, something new at the time.
Bertha died in 1937. She left a legacy of education programs that lasts today. Both her kindergarten training school and the dramatic arts school were incorporated into other schools that still exist.
The third daughter, Amalie Hofer Jerome, was a pioneer in the playground movement and will be profiled next.
MarchWomen’s History Month – Part 4 on the Hofer Sisters
“Through all this forceful, excellent work the efforts of one woman have been particularly effective. Though working quietly and modestly, Chicago possesses no benefactor more logical, and far sighted, and public spirited than Mrs. Amalia Hofer Jerome. Mrs. Jerome is editor of the Kindergarten magazine, has for several years conducted a kindergarten training school bearing her name at the commons, and has been chairman of the playgrounds committee of the permanent school extension.”
– Chicago Tribune, July 31, 1910
This accolade was written for the third Hofer sister, Amalie, who with her four siblings, became a leader in the kindergarten, settlement, and playground movements, well beyond the borders of Chicago.
Oldest sister Mari was a recognized expert in music education and programs; second sister Bertha was a renowned educator and administrator.
Amalie Hofer Jerome (1863-1941) was most associated with publishing, speaking, and playgrounds, as well as being an educator.
Amalie learned about the publishing trade from working with her father at the family’s newspaper in Iowa. All eight children were involved in running the newspaper. Her three brothers moved to the West coast and started newspapers of their own. Amalie and her younger sister Andrea moved to Chicago and published materials for the kindergarten profession.
Like her sisters, Amalie came to Chicago to further her education and career. She graduated from the Chicago Kindergarten College, the program conducted by Elizabeth Harrison, and took graduate classes at the University of Chicago.
Amalie went to work as an instructor in the kindergarten department of the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology.
In 1892, the Hofer sisters took over as editors of the floundering Kindergarten Magazine, started around 1886. They revitalized the publication, which offered scholarly articles, book reviews, detailed reports of presentations at education conferences, and sharing of information from kindergarten programs around the globe. It was the only magazine of its kind, and the leaders of the kindergarten and other social movements contributed to it. Articles covered everything from psychology and international education politics to ideas for classroom crafts and holiday parties.
The sisters set up their own publishing company, the Kindergarten Literature Company, with an office downtown, and also started a magazine for children and mothers called Child Garden of Story, Song, and Play. Hofers ran these magazines for over ten years.
One newspaper described all of the Hofer sisters as “deep and clear thinkers” having “great energy and enterprise.” They often worked together but they also all had their own careers and interests. Amalie seemed to be everywhere at once. Listing all of her accomplishments is not possible, but here are a few highlights.
Amalie found time to be principal of her sister Bertha’s training school for kindergarten teachers, started at the Chicago Commons Social Settlement. She taught at the prestigious Chatauqua Summer Schools for teachers in New York. She taught at the Summer School of the South in Knoxville, Tennessee, with sister Mari. She was the U.S. delegate to the Paris Educational Conference. She was a member of the Publications Committee of the Western Drawing Teachers’ Association and spoke at their annual meetings. She was a leader of a PEO in Illinois.
During the annual meeting of the National Education Association in 1892, a group of kindergarten professionals proposed the formation of an organization to focus on the interests of this growing area of practice, and to work on programs for the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The International Kindergarten Union was started, and Mari, Bertha, Amalie, and Andrea Hofer became charter members. Amalie later served as president.
Amalie took a four-month trip around the world to visit kindergartens in other countries. She visited Cuba, the Hawaiian Islands, Japan, China, India, Egypt, the Philippines, Italy, France, and England. Upon her return, she gave “delightfully interesting and educational talks” on her travels. Throughout her career she was a frequent presenter and author of articles, known for her practical and engaging approach.
Next post: More on Amalie Hofer Jerome.
Women’s History Month – Part 5 on the Hofer Sisters
This continues the story of Amalie Hofer Jerome started in the last post.
In addition to their kindergarten endeavors, Amalie and her sisters were active members of many women’s clubs, including the Chicago Woman’s Club. In 1916, Amalie co-authored the Annals of the Chicago Woman’s Club for the First Forty Years of Its Organization 1876 – 1916, used today as the primary authority on this historically significant club.
Although women could not vote – and as expected, all of the Hofers including the parents and sons were suffragists – they were still very interested and involved in politics. Amalie was ward leader through one of the clubs.
As enlightened citizens, the Hofers paid attention to global politics. Their father had been a revolutionary in Germany, and the kindergarten movement was an international endeavor. The Hofers were progressive in their politics and advocated for international understanding and peace.
In 1905, Austrian pacifist Baroness Bertha von Suttner won the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1912, the Baroness reached out to the women of the U.S. to work for international peace. Amalie and her oldest sister Mari led the Chicago Woman’s Club to vote to invite the Baroness to come to the U.S. to present her cause to the American public. The Hofer sisters secured funding for the lecture tour from the World Peace Foundation, and helped arrange for the baroness to speak to 120 educational, civic, and church societies across the country.
In 1909, at the age of 45, Amalie married Frank Jerome, a furniture merchant. Jerome was a widower with several adult children.
Marriage did not cause Amalie to “settle down.” In fact, from 1910 to 1916, she was head resident of the Fellowship House Social Settlement at 831 West 33rd Street, in the stockyards, established in 1895 with Amalie’s help. She was active with the settlement’s women’s club, and even after stepping down as head resident, she stayed on the settlement’s board, managing the settlement house activities.
In addition to the settlement movement, which was discussed in the last post about Bertha Hofer Hegner, the kindergarten movement was closely connected to another reform movement of the Progressive Era, the playground movement.
The playground movement was started in the 1890s by reformers who advocated that supervised play could improve the mental, moral, and physical well-being of children, and this expanded to include adult activities as well. City parks and playgrounds, swimming pools and fieldhouses were built, with trained play leaders and planned activities.
In 1907, the Playground Association of America was started, with President Theodore Roosevelt as honorary president and Jane Addams of Hull House as a vice president. Amalie and Mari Hofer were founding members. They also helped start the Playground Association of Chicago, and Amalie sat on the board of directors and was later president. She worked with people like Jens Jensen, the landscape architect for Chicago parks.
The group arranged “great play festivals” like one in Garfield Park in 1909 that featured gymnastic and athletic drills, and folk games and dances. It was attended by 30,000 people. Amalie was on the planning committee.
In 1910, Amalie published an article in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on “The Playground as Social Center,” which became a classic in the profession.
The 1910 Chicago Tribune article (quoted at the beginning of the last post) was a two-page spread on the playgrounds of Chicago, which had just hired social workers to oversee play activities, the first city in the country to do so.
In 1913, Amalie was a founder of the Civic Music Association in Chicago. For several years, in the evenings and on Sunday afternoons, free concerts and community songfests had been given in the field houses of the city’s parks by notable musicians, and the time had come to better organize the activities. There was no one more qualified to do this than Amalie Hofer Jerome.
As a leader of the Playground Association and the Chicago Woman’s Club, Amalie had been instrumental in arranging the concerts. She now took on the role of chairman of the executive committee of the new organization. With her guidance, numerous groups, such as the Northwestern University choir and the Illinois Theater orchestra, provided free concerts in the parks, bringing enjoyment of the arts to groups of people who could not afford pricey concert tickets.
In her role with this music association, Amalie was named an honorary vice president for the lighting ceremony for the first Chicago municipal Christmas tree in 1913. The 35-foot tree on a 40-foot base was set up just north of the Art Institute and was covered with electric lights donated by the Commonwealth Edison Company. Over 100,000 people attended that first lighting ceremony.
People like the Hofers never really “retire,” and Amalie continued her work well into her senior years. As an example, in 1929, as a member of the Board of Directors of the Park Ridge School for Girls, she presided at the ceremony for the corner-stone laying for a new dormitory designed by Beverly architect John Todd Hetherington.
The Hofers have a family burial plot in Mount Hope Cemetery on 115th Street, and Amalie and Frank Jerome were laid to rest there.
Next posts: The youngest Hofer sisters, Andrea and Elsa.
National Poetry Month – Part 6 on the Hofer Sisters
Continuing our series on the Hofer sisters of Beverly, this post presents Andrea Hofer Proudfoot (1866 – 1949), the fourth of the five sisters. Like her sisters, she was a pioneer in the kindergarten movement. She was also the poet in the family, a timely story for National Poetry Month in April.
In the mid-1880s, Andrea joined her sisters in moving to Chicago from Iowa for education and career opportunities.
Documentation of her education has not been found yet, but was likely similar to her sisters’. Theirs included attending the Chicago Kindergarten College and doing graduate work at the University of Chicago and other universities, and at least one of them, Bertha, studied in Germany at a kindergarten college run by the niece of Friedrich Froebel, the pioneer educator in the kindergarten movement. The kindergartens in the U.S. were based on Froebel’s system, and the Hofers were strong advocates of his teachings.
Andrea was a writer, and was interested in the publishing field, which she and her brothers and sisters learned about at the newspaper their father ran in Iowa.
In 1889, Kindergarten Magazine was started, offering professional articles and practical tips for kindergarten teachers. The magazine was also designed to appeal to mothers of young children. It quickly became important in the field, with well-regarded educators like Elizabeth Peabody and Francis W. Parker involved.
Andrea volunteered as assistant editor for Kindergarten Magazine in 1890-91, and several of her articles and poems appeared in the magazine. Examples were “Lessons in Zoology,” “Francois Delsarte – His Life Work,” “A Morning’s Talk for Froebel’s Birthday,” “Don’t Say Don’t,” and “The Labor Problem and the Child.” Her poem, “A Flower Carol,” is presented here.
Andrea also wrote articles on kindergarten that appeared in other journals, like the Northwest Journal of Education. One example in 1893 was “Kindergarten – A Little Talk on Literature for Children,” which discussed gift-book giving for children. The article started with the statement, “’There is nothing too good for the children,’ is the rule of the Kindergarten.”
In 1892, Andrea and her older sister Amalie bought Kindergarten Magazine, and on January 1, 1893, their new corporation, the Kindergarten Literature Company, was started. They were listed as co-editors of the magazine. Their parents and other supporters contributed financially to the magazine. Andrea, Amalie, and older sister Mari Hofer, the musician in the family, all contributed significantly to the content of the magazine, and it became the premier publication in the kindergarten field.
Andrea wrote a small book, Child’s Christ Tales, with stories, poems, and illustrations about the birth and childhood of Jesus, that was published in 1892. Much of her writing had a religious theme to it.
On November 9, 1893, Andrea married Frederick William Proudfoot, a lawyer from Englewood whose practice included legal work with the Chicago Board of Trade. His younger sister, Mary Proudfoot, was a kindergarten director and art teacher who rose to some prominence in the field. Mary wrote articles for Kindergarten Magazine; one example was “Day by Day with Nature – For the Kindergarten and Primary Grades.”
One of Proudfoot’s wedding gifts to Andrea was an estate in North Beverly known as “Oakhurst.” This became the site of a kindergarten training school she founded with her younger sister, Elsa, called The Froebellian School for Young Women. In the summers, they ran the school as the Longwood Summer School.
Andrea also started an organization in Beverly called the League of American Mothers.
The next post will look at Andrea’s and Elsa’s Beverly-based operations.
Mother’s Day – Part 7 on the Hofer Sisters – the League of American Mothers
Today is Mother’s Day, the perfect day to continue the series on Andrea Hofer Proudfoot, the fourth of the five Hofer sisters, who started the League of American Mothers.
In November of 1893, Andrea, 27, married Frederick William Proudfoot, an attorney from Englewood whose practice included legal work with the Chicago Board of Trade.
One of Proudfoot’s wedding gifts to Andrea was an estate in North Beverly known as “Oakhurst” located at today’s address of 9333 S. Vanderpoel Avenue. The street was previously known as Prospect and then Howard Court. Andrea and Frederick moved into the house and started a family; six children were born to them between 1894 and 1907.
Around 1895, Andrea and her younger sister Elizabeth (Elsa) Hofer Schreiber started a school in the Proudfoot home they called the Froebellian School for Young Women. This school trained women to be kindergarten teachers, based on the principles of Friedrich Froebel, a Prussian educator who founded kindergartens in Germany in the 1830s. He based his schools and training programs on the principles originally developed in the 1700s by Swiss educator Johan Heinrich Pestalozzi.
The school incorporated much more than classroom work, giving the women who trained there a variety of hands-on experiences. By 1900, the facilities included: the kindergarten teacher training program; a kindergarten for young children; boys’ and girls’ clubs; a grade school that continued the kindergarten principles and included industrial training in onsite workshops; high school level classes for girls; a playground open to all children; and a summer school program (then called vacation schools) for disadvantaged inner-city children. During the summers, the school also ran professional-level programs for educators as the Longwood Summer School.
Central to this operation were also education and support programs for mothers. In 1895, Andrea formed the League of American Mothers that rose to national prominence. Local Leagues were set up all around the country. Any mother or teacher could join, there were no dues; the League was largely operated and funded personally by Andrea. Groups of mothers met frequently at the Proudfoot home and were involved in all of the school programs.
A multi-year course of self-study for mothers was developed through the League, using materials written by Andrea. The books included “A Mother’s Ideals: A Kindergarten Mother’s Conception of Family Life” for the first year of study, published in 1897; and “A Year with the Mother-Play,” for the second year, published in 1902. For mothers who could not afford to purchase the books, thousands of “travelling libraries” were set up around the country.
Andrea dedicated the first book, “A Mother’s Ideals,” to her own mother, Mari Ruef Hofer. Andrea wrote: “To My Mother – Who has been preserved to the simplicities of life through having child companions; whose duty toward the home has kept her from pursuing schoolishness; who has studied more deeply into the affections than into psychology; and who loves humanity because it has been given an impulse onward through her as a channel, and an impulse upward through her spiritual striving for her children.”
Teachers-in-training boarded at the school. All of this went on in the Proudfoot home. It can only be imagined what a busy place this property in North Beverly must have been.
Related to all of this, Andrea started a new magazine, Child-Garden of Story, Song and Play. This magazine was published from their house in North Beverly, and the subscription price was $1.00 for twelve issues.
Child-Garden was described by Andrea as “the national organ of the League of American Mothers.” Each issue included poetry and stories for and by children, ideas for kindergarten teachers, and a section related to the League with subject matter for mothers’ programs, advice and discussion. Mothers were invited to correspond directly with Andrea at her Beverly address, and many did. Some of their letters were included in the magazine.
Andrea offered educated and practical advice to mothers. In the December 1900 edition of Child-Garden, for example, Andrea advised mothers to ignore advertisements and articles about diseases and “quackery patent medicine concerns” and to get advice from trusted medical professionals when needed. Child-Garden refused to carry such questionable medical content even though it cost them advertising revenue.
Child-Garden offered advice like “we expect too much from punishment – it will not take the place of firm, kind, loving, intelligent watchfulness.” Another piece of advice was that no two people were alike and children should not be forced to conform too much one way or another; they should be allowed to work things out.
Mothers wrote heart-felt letters to Andrea with statements like, "I feel as if you were my friend."
Leading up to a national congress on motherhood in 1900, in which Andrea and the League were expected to play a major role, one newspaper wrote, “Mrs. Proudfoot is a pioneer in the mothers’ work of this country. She is urging the mothers of this land into a higher respect for their calling and demands that they shall put it upon a professional basis through study and demonstration.”
The school in North Beverly ran for about nine years. In December of 1914, there was a curious article in the Chicago Tribune that a fire had occurred in the now-empty building – at the time, Andrea was spending a lot of time in Vienna, Austria, with her children who were there for educational reasons. A neighbor all but accused Andrea of arson, and the article wondered if charges would be forth coming. No more was found on this and within a few months Andrea was back to being prominently mentioned in the paper for heading a Republican women’s group, so apparently the charges were baseless.
This brings us to one more topic related to Andrea and her Hofer sisters – their involvement in politics and the international peace and amnesty movement, which will be covered in the next post.
Part 10 – The Hofer Sisters and Politics
The Hofer family lived in Beverly from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s, about 25 years, during the height of the Progressive Era.
That era was marked by widespread reform and change in just about every area of life, from education to business to human rights. Today, kindergartens and other early development programs for young children, playgrounds, parenting classes and resources, and related activities are taken for granted. However, 100 to 150 years ago, they were considered radical, “progressive” social movements that visionary people fought to establish.
They also fought to establish rights for children. Using children for hard labor, in sweat shops, and out on the streets, was condoned for centuries, like slavery had been. Slavery was abolished in the 1860s, and the Progressive Era saw the beginning of the end of that kind of abuse of children.
While the Hofer sisters were leaders in these movements, their political activities extended beyond these issues. The five Hofer sisters were all politically active, but especially so was Andrea Hofer Proudfoot, who rose to international fame for her contributions to the international peace and amnesty movement.
The progressive spirit came from the Hofer parents, Andreas and Mari, revolutionaries from the German-Swiss border area. In the U.S., they moved from the east coast to Iowa seeking new opportunities and to be closer to friends. There, a brief stint in the early 1850s in a socialist commune called Communia left them disillusioned with socialist and communist systems, but still believing in the need for social and political reforms.
The Hofer family ran a newspaper in Iowa for many years which gave them the opportunity to share their progressive beliefs. All of the children worked at the newspaper, and the three sons moved to the west coast to pursue careers in the newspaper publication business.
The Hofer parents and the five daughters moved to Chicago to allow the daughters education and employment opportunities, itself a progressive attitude toward women.
The Hofer sisters, as no surprise, were suffragists, believing that women should have the right to vote. In an article in 1912, Andrea was described as “outspoken and sweeping in her advocacy.” When another woman suggested “indirect influence” was preferable to voting, Andrea “scathingly denounced this as immoral and wrong.” She used parenting as an example to explain her view. A parent does not “influence” children; a parent would “inculcate right principles and teach children to stand firmly by these.”
Women received the right to vote in the U.S. in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Long before that, however, they were involved in politics at the local, national, and international level.
The kindergarten movement was an international movement that originated in the Switzerland/Germany/Prussia area and spread to the U.S., thanks to women like the Hofer sisters. The kindergarten movement started with Swiss educator Johan Pestalozzi in the late 1700s, and was furthered in the 1800s by Friedrich Froebel in Prussia/Germany. Several of the Hofer sisters did graduate work in Berlin, Germany, at the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus. Froebel’s niece ran the program in Berlin.
Andrea spent time in Europe, not just for her own education, but with her children. For periods of time, she left her school in Beverly in the capable hands of her sisters Elsa and Mari and resided overseas.
In May of 1907, the Chicago Tribune ran a full-page story about Andrea and her five children, ages 2 to 9, moving to Italy for nine months. The article focused on how economically she was doing this, spending no more than it would have cost to stay home in Chicago. The article was full of advice from Andrea, from booking second class steerage on a ship to renting a villa and hiring local help to keeping warm in winter. The children traveled by donkey cart to a private school that taught German. Andrea’s husband Frederick, a lawyer with the Chicago Board of Trade, stayed home in Chicago, and sent the adventurers money on a monthly basis.
Quite a few pacifist and women’s rights organizations were formed in the late 1800s, in the U.S. and in Europe. The pacifist and feminist causes became intertwined at an international level; in fact, historians have found that pacifism and this first-wave of feminism were equated in the minds of the general public at the time.
One very prominent international woman pacifist was Baroness Bertha Von Suttner (1843 – 1914) of Austria. The Baroness founded the Austrian Peace Society in 1892, and in 1905 she was named the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, in part due to her 1889 anti-war novel “Die Waffen nieder!” as well as numerous other political pacifist writings and lectures. [Andrea Hofer Proudfoot adapted the Baroness’s novel into English (Disarm! Disarm!) in 1913 and it is still available today.]
The Baroness addressed many of her communications directly to women and the women’s clubs of the U.S. became her followers. In 1912, thanks to the Hofer sisters, she made a coast-to-coast tour of the U.S., speaking to women’s groups and peace organizations. She advocated for universal peace and women’s suffrage, declaring them “the two great movements for the betterment of humanity.”
The next post will cover the Baroness’s visit to the U.S., and other political activities of Andrea and her sisters.